Project Overview

The CANEs project is organized around three main thrusts:

The first is the development of Active Network and Service Architectures. This effort supports the development of a coherent architectural framework for active networks including consistent terminology, minimum functional requirements, and interface specifications. The documents produced as a result of this effort, including the Architectural Framework for Active Networks, are helping to focus and leverage the efforts of the DARPA active networks community.
The second thrust is the investigation of application support mechanisms, i.e. active, network-based capabilities that enhance the communication service and/or performance seen by users of the network. Examples of such mechanisms include user-controllable methods for reacting to congestion, transparent caching of information in network nodes, and support for multicast video distribution to heterogeneous end-users. Our approach in all cases is to compare active mechanisms to best known end-to-end mechanisms and to emphasize the use of modest amounts of state and computation to achieve significant performance gains. We use analysis and simulation to gather evidence of effectiveness, then prototype to provide proof-of-concept and support refinement of the mechanisms.
The third part of our effort is focused on the Composable Active Network Elements (CANEs) Execution Environment and its ancillary and support software. The output of this thrust is a software prototype execution environment supporting mechanisms of the type described above, in the context of an efficient "plain old forwarding service". The fundamental idea of CANEs is to provide a foundation, in the form of one or more generic behaviors (the underlying program), plus the ability to extend those behaviors through an event-driven composition mechanism and code "injected" into the network (the injected program). Customizing mechanisms are considered for inclusion only after being shown effective by experimental studies.
While the CANEs EE is intended to run on "standard" Node Operating System platforms, the early stage of development of NodeOSs has necessitated development of an interim platform for CANEs. The software, which is called Bowman, implements a subset of the NodeOS interface, and can support other EEs in addition to CANEs.

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